Fire Up Litho! (I guess:)

  After years of asking, the administration finally agreed to let me move the Conrad litho press that has been mothballed for years, into my classroom. So, even though it wasn't really on my agenda, I guess I will be setting up a grinding station (outside, with a table and a hose) and getting something drawn on a small stone so I can crank out a print or two this summer. It would be so great if I could actually offer litho as an option to my students next fall.

    I think this little image came out of my time at Wheatland a couple of years ago. I've done it about 100 times and never achieved a final product with it. Maybe all it needs is a smooth stone and a good litho crayon. I reckon I'd better practice with pencil and paper first!

I'm such a novice :/

Well, DAYS later, I am realizing we could have easily built that cube from the ground up if we had thought to do it, and we wouldn't have had to pester any of the numbers people.

We could have just made a vertical foreshortened square and lined up two more on its receding plane, using what I call "The X Thing" (this is why I can't play with the adults) to make the perspective right. That would give the height and width of all the squares on that side.

Am I making sense?

Dividing a Receding Plane into Three Parts

Two of my students decided to draw Rubik's Cubes for their perspective/shading assignment. Dividing a receding plane into fours is easy, but threes were another matter altogether. I quickly realized I had no idea how to do it.

Lucky for me, my students are from many different specialty areas, including engineering and economics. Those people are very good at problems like this, and a couple of days after I asked the question in class, a very nice young man named Dillon provided me with several computer drawings he had made. All of them solved the problem, each in a slightly different way.

This is my drawing of one of his examples. I keep getting lost in all the relationships contained in this little cube. Seems like magic to me.

Another Possibility

   I don't remember how this image came about. She certainly has a tough job, working hard at rowing through the air in a leaky boat. Still, I like her strength, rowing against the odds. 

    I'm leaning toward this one for my new canvas. Look how many tries it took for me to realize her back needed to face the bow! Sheesh!

   I just stretched a new small canvas with linen (my first try at it!), and I'm looking for a new image for it.    

    I just found this in my sketchbook. It is an image of my dear friend Chris, who was born on the exact same day as me, almost a whole country apart.  

   The last time I saw Chris, he told me he had bought some heavy duty hiking boots and was finding peace on his walks. I imagined those boots taking him to all kinds of beautiful places.

I have one more possible image in mind. It's a bit trickier than this one. I'll post it when I settle on a good viewpoint.